The same rules don’t appear to apply to all

If there’s one thing that really rankles top sportsmen and women it is inconsistency in the decisions made by officialdom, so it is fair to say the International Cricket Council (ICC) will have incensed a lot of cricketers in the last little while.

Kagiso Rabada finds himself in the dock for inconsequential behaviour that has been pretty standard fare for fast bowlers in years gone past. His biggest mistake has been to let off steam in the batsman’s face, which then made it much easier for him to make physical contact with Australian captain Steve Smith, who was in no two minds about holding his ground either.

But Rabada’s crimes have been committed in the heat of battle and they are intimidating without ever threatening to actually cross the line into violent behaviour. Is that not what fast-bowling is all about?

In Durban we had David Warner needing to be physically restrained by his team-mates – once on the field after the run-out of AB de Villiers and once off it after Quinton de Kock delved into the history of his wife, much like the Australians regularly do to batsmen on the field. Neither of those incidents were deemed worthy of three demerit points by match referee Jeff Crowe, with Proteas captain Faf du Plessis saying the rationale was that the “headmaster” wanted to keep the star players in the series. It’s strange that thinking only lasted one week and then Rabada was banned.

I guess we should be grateful that at least some action was taken against Warner though because in the India series, practically every South African batsman received a screaming send-off from Virat Kohli and nothing was done about that.

There is a tendency in Africa, often justified, to feel victimised but it’s not just South Africans who have noticed the inconsistencies in the way the ICC handles on-field discipline: speaking to the Australian media, they are full of stories about how India get away with all sorts of lawlessness against them.

“By the end of the series in India, we were getting away with things we should have been fined for, simply because India were doing the same things and the ICC didn’t want to punish any of their players,” one senior Australian cricket writer told me recently.

The inconsistency is caused by a hopelessly vague code of conduct and there is a need for the officials to be more proactive when it comes to handling inflammatory situations. They need to step in sooner when abuse is flying around for a couple of hours as it did in Durban.

Instead of focusing on minor offences, and accumulating these until someone like Rabada has a ban, and is punished twice for the same incidents, the ICC should spend more energy on ensuring that premeditated acts of abuse and skulduggery are stamped out.

There are many sources of frustration for cricketers over the period of five days out in the field, but the officials should be ameliorating those passions and not inflaming them. The fact that bowlers – who have a tough job in these batsmen-friendly days – can be charged with an offence if the officials believe their actions could have provoked an aggressive approach from the dismissed batsman is vague nonsense. How about the batsmen taking some responsibility for their actions?

The fact that Mitchell Marsh was fined for swearing at Rabada was surprising … in accordance with the above rule, the bowler could have been called to task for “looking at the batsman in a strange fashion, thus provoking the reaction”.

The ICC have also just set themselves up for even more inconsistency because swearing is rife on the field but Marsh has now been fined for “offensive language”. Crowe is also being replaced as match referee by Andy Pycroft, which means the last two Tests will be played under another set of strange, incomprehensible rules.